Western Short StoryThe Bridgetown BardTom Sheehan

Western Short Story

When the last
bridge was built on the Topeka Road, over the Squash River, and a
town grew up around the construction site, the laborers called it
Bridgetown. Campsites and quickly-built shacks rose abruptly on the
nearby grass and in the sudden valley that lead down to the river.
The workers, of course, after long days at hard labor, slept well,
or, after a night of drinking, slept perhaps a bit sounder. Liquor
was supplied by a couple of industrious men, in the beginning right
from the back of their wagon. And many of the workers did not move on
once the community had its growing legs, stretching the walk.

For the first few
months there were no lady friends around and entertainment came from
cards, rough music in the hands of many real amateurs, and games of
man versus man in various frolics of mind and muscle, like checkers
and tossing the caber, roping and wrestling, target shooting and
poker.

Loneliness, thus,
made its continuous way into camp, and into the resultant town now
spreading its wings.

A few alert men
later remembered the day the lone rider came along the road strumming
his guitar, singing songs they had never heard, and riding a mule
that moved slower than all-out misery.

“Where you from,
Mister? What’s that song you’re singing? Where did that come
from? You from Tennessee? Who wrote that song?” Many of the workers
were from “back east a ways” and looked often for any connection
to the past they had left for the dreams in the west.

“Well, gents,”
said the guitar player and singer, still on his mule, “I never sing
a song I didn’t write myself. My name’s Timothy Rains, I never
ride the train, conductors never complain, what else can I explain?”

Reining back on his
mount, he immediately broke into another song; “I’m coming down
the ramp into the Bridgetown camp, my horse is itchin’ for some
oats and my delicious melodious notes that I wrote last night. Those
notes I wrote out there in the bare campfire light.”

Needless to say, he
was cheered on and dared on, “Let’s see how fast you can write a
song.” Those early greeters railed at him to perform. “Do it up.
Do it up,” they sang and sang.

“Whoa,” the
bard said. “Hold it. Whoa. A drink I had ain’t since school, none
for me and my mule. He’s dry as bone, I’m without a tone.” He
laughed and they laughed and the aura was set.

Timothy Rains had
made his mark directly on entry into Bridgetown, a one-man band of
entertainment and manipulation of the language and a bare knowledge
of things musical … he’d be the first to say he couldn’t sing
worth a damn, if he was asked, but nobody in Bridgetown, sorely in
need of some kind of entertainment, would ever ask a volunteer to
explain himself.

Out at the last
bridge on the road he gazed, did our hero Rains, seeing the network
of timbers as they criss-crossed and moved upwards in a measured
latticework. The bridge was nearly across the river, its feet now
firmly planted on both sides of the river but not completely joined
yet, a broad and magnificent reach speaking loudly about planning,
daring, commitment to a task, the hard work by all hands … hands
who must be entertained, and thus literally “milked” of their few
dollars, a poor trade off if they were ever to be asked … but
nobody taking in the coin would ever ask for an explanation.

Rains, on first
sight of the wagon dispensing liquor, squirreled the two owners into
a quick conversation, swung a deal with both men, cornered a piece of
land from a squatter for a few dollars, and put down the first plank
on a saloon. It took only a few weeks to build, some of the lumber
and supplies mysteriously coming available in hours of darkness,
obviously from railroad supplies meant for the bridge and ongoing
construction work.

But the first,
original and only saloon ever allowed in Bridgetown, The
Bridgeworkers Bar and Grill, began its two-year reign of existence on
the far side of the bridge. Timothy Rains, chief proprietor, barkeep,
waiter, song and dance man, sole entertainer for long months, ran a
tight shop where coin was considered. It was this activity that
prompted him to propose a bank to be built in town “to hold in
account the good business success of Bridgetown.” Of course, it was
to be built as an annex to his current property, The Bridgeworkers
Bar and Grill.

Nothing but success
at business and his strange talents set Rains aside as “different”
in the community. All else with him was the same as the eager men
locked into dreams of the golden nugget, the big find, the elusive
female companionship that all the townsfolk clung to.

Life for Rains went
sweeping along as the saloon did a grand business, the bank opened,
and the bridge, nearing final completion, brought a flurry of
activity into the area. The basic core of that flurry was the arrival
of a blonde woman with oriental cheekbones, eyes blue as a grand sky,
and a robust figure that caught the eyes of every man in Bridgetown,
especially the eyes of the town’s leading citizen. When he first
saw Geraldine Malden his heart leaped like it had never leaped. A
song wanted to come to his mouth, but it never made its way out of
his chest. It was the first real announcement that life for him, as
he had known it, had ultimately changed.

“Mr. Rains,”
she said as she walked up to him standing in front of the saloon, now
four times its original size and a floor taller, “I am Geraldine
Malden and I understand that you have rooms upstairs. I would like to
rent one for some weeks, if that is possible, but it has to be a nice
room and not any flea-littered tract of wasteland, like some of the
places I have seen and never dared enter for a night.”

Her hand in his
hand was the softest thing he had touched since a baby rabbit had
quivered in his hands out on the prairie, and it put an attractive
halting into his voice. “Of course, Ma’am,” he said, “the
best room in the house is yours.”

“Why thank you,
Mr. Rains, but I would have assumed that you had the best room in the
house,” Her eyes flashed wickedly, but with a reigning innocence
that stayed with him.

“It was my room
indeed, Ma’am, but now it is yours. It shall be made up to suit you
in a few hours. In the meantime, may I treat you to dinner in the
saloon, in the restaurant part, of course?” We know, of a
certainty, that all rhyme and reason had gone away in a hurry. He
could not rhyme two words in an instant if he was bent over backwards
… the words just did not come to him.

It was a romance of
the ages, of the era, of the growing west, and Rains worked harder
than ever to make business better than even he had dreamed of. The
pair, loving lovebirds to all onlookers, made the romance one of
gayety and color, and any free moment he would drive her in a
carriage to show her the area around Bridgetown. When the first
engine, without any cars attached to it, sort of a test run, passed
over the bridge, a huge celebration took place. Rains threw open the
bar for a solid two hours, “as long as the day’s supply lasts,”
he said in his announcement. Then he added, “I will say now that
the first passenger and freight train is due here two days from now,
on Monday of the week, and we’ll have a real celebration, a daylong
that Bridgetown will remember forever.” He smiled at Geraldine
standing at the head of the stairs, as beautiful as he had ever seen
her.

It was such moments
as this one, seeing how she could burst a day wide open by just
standing still in one place, that he wished he could make up a song
for her, sing the words like he had never sung before, let her know
he was hers completely.

Geraldine smiled at
him as if she was reading his thoughts. She sent that slight, subtle
flirtatious nod and eye move, almost a wink, down to him that cut
through to his heart. If he could not write a song for her at that
moment, he’d never be able to write a song. In effect, he accepted
that agreement as though no words would make any difference in how he
felt about her.

She managed a wave
of one hand that was just as subtle and just as inviting when she
turned back to her room in the front of the building and disappeared
from sight. There was a sudden emptiness above him, a place that lost
its immediate luster in a fraction of a second. He couldn’t believe
the sudden loss, how the general surroundings went away with her, all
the things that he thought he saw, thought he knew, and thought were
real.

At that moment, the
teller of the bank, and his accounting specialist, Joel Wardlin,
approached him and said, “Boss, we got to put some of this money in
the vault. This is one of the best days we’ve ever had, and
Smithson at the general store said the same thing to me just now.
He’s almost at a selling-out point and expects his new load of
supplies to come in on the train tomorrow. Says he better put it in
the vault too. He also said he saw a few new faces in town today and
yesterday and is a bit nervous. I told him I’d speak to you, but
all I saw have been a few new prospectors bound for the hills above
us and those bare dreams we all have.”

“Go ahead, Joel,”
Rains said, still locked onto the memory of Geraldine’s image as
she turned away, the shine in her hair, the movement of her body, the
little wave of her hand the way a sworn secret is carried out in full
view of the world. “You do what you think you have to do, Joel.
You’re a good man at the job. But I have something to tell you;
some of the ladies have been calling you ‘the handsome dog who
hides all the money in town.’ Some of them, for sure, are bound to
have their eye on you, Joel. You best watch your tail before you get
caught up in it all.”

“That isn’t
always bad, is it, Boss?” His smile was as wide as the river, or
the bridge that crossed it.

That night the
blast went off. It was near 2 o’clock in the morning, Monday
morning, the morning after a full celebration and another day of it
coming along. Some people never heard a sound, but some, like Rains,
scrambled from bed wondering where the loud sound had come from. A
few men rushed into the street and a fusillade of shots greeted them
from too many corners worth counting, or noting. They scrambled back
to their protective surroundings … any wall was protection for the
moment.

One man had cried
out as a bullet hit him in his thigh, and Rains, never thinking about
the bank, only about Geraldine up in her room, rushed around to get a
gun, any gun, preferably a rifle that was lodged for emergencies
under the bar.

It was not there.
Nor was the barkeep’s pistol, supposedly lodged in the same spot.
Some alert person, he couldn’t figure who, had beaten him to it.
Forces, at least, were at work.

Panic hit him. He
thought about the bank. Disbelieved his thought. Nobody in town would
dare rob his bank. In a brief second he forgot about the bank and
remembered Geraldine alone upstairs, exposed to gunfire and what else
might come along.

In a mad-long dash
he reached the stairs and started to climb them. More gunfire rang
out, sounding as if it was coming from the back of the building
instead of the front, where it had started. Still in a panic about
Geraldine’s safety, he jammed his shoulder against the door of her
room, not knocking as she had demanded right from the very beginning.
The door burst open as he jammed his whole body at it.

The room was empty.

Geraldine was not
there.

He glanced at her
bureau. He saw nothing. The drawers were empty. The small closet was
empty.

She was gone.
Geraldine was gone. The love and light of his life was gone. More
gunfire ensued when he looked out her window down onto the main
street. It was as though they were shooting directly at him. He
ducked low, looked around again, and rushed down the stairs.

One of the old
faithful customers, a drunk if you’ll have it, was sitting at the
bar, a full bottle at hand.

Rains yelled at
him. “Have you seen Geraldine? She’s not upstairs. Have you seen
her?”

The drunk,
topsy-turvy if ever he was, said, “Last I saw of her, before the
shooting, her and Joel were going in the door of the bank. He’s
that good lookin’ one that works for you, you know the one I’m
talkin’ about? The good lookin’ one all the ladies talk about?”
He poured himself another full shot of whiskey, oblivious of his
surroundings.

Rains fled the
saloon, heading to the bank.

There was a silence
suddenly in the air. The general store owner, Smithson, stood beside
him, and said, “They hit the bank, Tim. Blew the door off the
vault, swept everything out of there and fled down the street and
across the bridge on a hand car, five of them, going like hell across
the bridge. We’re getting a posse together right now. I got a horse
coming for you.”

“I can’t go
now. I have to find Geraldine. She’s not up in her room. I looked.
There’s nothing there. I have to find her before she gets hurt.”
He turned to go somewhere.

Smithson said, a
halting in his voice, “She’s with them, Tim.” He had a sheepish
look on his face.

“She’s part of
them, Tim. Her and Joel are the bosses, from what it looks like to
me. The livery boy said he heard her giving orders, said he heard her
say, ‘We have to get to the other side of the bridge as soon as we
can. Once we get over there, the way the river’s rushing mad, we
have a great chance to get away with everything.’”

“No!” yelled
Rains. “Not Geraldine. Not my Geraldine.” The panic was full
bore. “We have to get over there, find out the truth.”

They mounted their
horses as the hastily-gathered posse reined up in front of them.

The whole troop of
the posse, Rains in the rushing lead, were almost at the entrance to
the bridge when the second explosion of the night went off. The blast
filled the night with a thunderous flash of light, accompanied by a
sound as if a monster bomb had exploded, and a huge chunk of the
brand new Bridgetown Bridge went clattering tumbling into the rushing
waters of the river.

Timothy Rains,
entrepreneur, maker of rhymes, song writer and entertainer, once a
saloon owner and a banker, felt the music in his throat, at his lips.